Seattle Airport Employee Who Stole And Crashed Plane Identified

The name of the airline worker who stole an empty airplane from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport in a security scare that caused the scrambling of U.S. fighter jets and ended when the plane crashed onto a sparsely populated island has been revealed.

He’s been identified as 29-year old Richard “Beebo” Russell — a Horizon Air employee described by friends and family as “an avid traveler, a high-school football standout and Christian youth leader who once operated an Oregon bakery with his wife,” according to the Seattle Times.

Russell went down in a fiery crash of the Bombardier Q400 turboprop on Ketron Island after pulling off a barrel roll and coming within feet of the water in what ultimately appeared to be a highly theatrical suicide. He spoke of family and friends and a disappointed life to the air traffic controller who spent the hour trying to talk him into landing: “It’s going to disappoint them to hear that I did this. I would like to apologize to each and every one of them. Just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess. Never really knew it, until now,” the now viral audio of the cockpit call captures Russell as …read more